# How to Make the Most of a Finite Life (w/ Oliver Burkeman) | How to Be a Better Human | TED ## Метаданные - **Канал:** TED - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F2DLThsEGE - **Дата:** 26.02.2025 - **Длительность:** 33:44 - **Просмотры:** 40,130 ## Описание There’s only so much you can do in a week — or, according to Oliver Burkeman, in the roughly 4,000 weeks the average human lives. Oliver is a journalist and author of the books "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Meditations for Mortals" and the newsletter “The Imperfectionist.” Chris and Oliver discuss the paradoxes of making change happen, how life’s mishaps can become our most treasured memories, and why sharing your imperfections can be an act of generosity. This is an episode of TED's How to Be a Better Human podcast. Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://tedtalks.social/4gmAZt3 For the full text transcript, visit https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Follow TED! X: https://twitter.com/TEDTalks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ted Facebook: https://facebook.com/TED LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoks The TED Talks channel features talks, performances and original series from the world's leading thinkers and doers. Subscribe to our channel for videos on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. Visit https://TED.com to get our entire library of TED Talks, transcripts, translations, personalized talk recommendations and more. https://youtu.be/6F2DLThsEGE TED's videos may be used for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International) and in accordance with our TED Talks Usage Policy: https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/our-policies-terms/ted-talks-usage-policy. For more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g. employee learning, in a film or online course), please submit a Media Request at https://media-requests.ted.com #TED #HowToBeABetterHuman #podcast ## Содержание ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F2DLThsEGE) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) most of us live our lives in a deep state of denial about how finite uh our lives are it's not that we don't know we're going to die I mean we if anybody here didn't realize that I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you but it's that we don't accept it deep down we don't live as if we were finite humans we instead do everything we can to try to maintain this comforting illusion that there'll always be more time for everything that we don't face these limitations of time this is how to be a better human I'm your host Chris duy most of us have about 4,000 weeks alive that's not a threat that's how long we have in the average human lifespan give or take a couple weeks and the author of the book 4,000 weeks Oliver burkeman is here with us today to talk about how you can make your limited time on Earth meaningful that's a kind of big weighty philosophical topic to try and Tackle in a short internet video and um I wouldn't say we're going to get to a decisive definitive answer but you never know we are going to try and figure out what you can do with those 4,000 weeks that you're given and you've already used a few so you better listen to this hello my name is Oliver burkman I'm an author and a journalist I wrote a book called 4,000 weeks time management for Mortals and my new book is meditations for Mortals I'm delighted to be talking to you because I've been a longtime reader of uh your newsletter the imperfectionist and I I'm big fan of both of your books I'm also interested because you've made a You made a pretty big change in your um in your personal life over the last few years and you moved from New York to North York which I just find somewhat delightful on a linguistic level but I wonder how a big change like that has played into your thinking about the meaning and the value of your time yeah we lived in Brooklyn for many years my wife is American uh and then we have spent the last few years in the north yor Moors it's a beauti beautiful Bleak part of the world but it is also like a living community of towns and Villages you know I think we thought we were doing something very kind of uh interesting and uh radical when we decided to uh leave or maybe not radical but at least self-determined and when I look back now it's just a kind of I'm just a sort of a pandemic data point right like everybody was doing this who could I think in many ways not not everybody but you know anyone who had that ability was considering it it's also a return to the area in which I grew up I do find that living in uh a rural area focuses one's mind in certain very helpful ways on how time is being used in some ways that's because I am surrounded by a landscape that I love and I have the opportunity to spend time in that almost every day uh you know out in the Blustery winds and under the big skies and all the rest of it and that is you know part of how I want to spend my finite time on the planet in another sense it's kind of inconvenient there's all these kind of little ways in which you're not just living in that sort of purely frictionless space and that too I think is actually really helpful in a way it's sometimes it's annoying right because I got to sort of think ahead about what I want to cook for dinner instead of just rushing out to the store while the pan is sizzling on the stove which could practically do where we uh where we lived before so there's a sort of a there's a deliberateness that is required sometimes um and then socially it's really interesting because yeah you might feel like it was Splendid isolation but actually you're a lot more reliant on and um interconnected with Neighbors in many ways than you need to be anyway uh in an urban environment I think it's interesting to hear you talk about this big life change because one of the messages of meditations for Mortals is that we often think we have to make some sort of huge dramatic shift in our life in order for our life to start or to have meaning or to finally be the person we want to be and your big argument is that shift will never happen right that we need to actually start right now and not worry about all of the big changes that could happen but rather just what is happening today it's interesting because in some ways you actually did make the big shift that people talk about like if only I moved to another country into the countryside there probably is a little bit of that fantasy when never anybody moves uh long distance or between cities or anything like that there's that slight sense of um now it's this that is going to answer all my problems I think I had already begun to see through that uh fantasy a bit by the time um we made this move but yeah regardless of what I thought you move somewhere else and like you're still there you brought yourself with you and all your kind of imperfections and limitations and yeah I think that one of the things that the new book is very much about is the idea that this ### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F2DLThsEGE&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) Moment of Truth or this moment of Problem free living this moment of getting over all the things about yourself that annoy you that isn't coming and this is great news this is not depressing news at all this is news that allows you to get on with living life to the full now instead of postponing that until the point at which you've completely fixed your procrastination problems or worked out how to be the perfect parent or whatever thing it is for you can we just Define some of the terms that I think are for me really resonant and that come up a lot um when people are reading you which is the title of your newsletter the imperfectionist and this idea of imperfection ISM and then relatedly um your book 4,000 weeks I'd love if we could just get I'm certainly not trying to get you to summarize the whole book but um where what is that number 4,000 weeks and what is imperfection ISM and how are those related as we then move into meditations for Mortals your latest book sure well 4 weeks is very roughly the average lifespan in the developed World these days um I rounded it down a bit to get to the round figure you know um the make for a better title there's something kind of stress inducing I'm well aware in expressing that figure in weeks right because if you express it in years then it's not as much smaller number but years feel like large units and if you express it in days well a day is very quick it's very easy to waste a day in my experience anyway but you get a lot of them there's something about the weeks that really sort of puts pressure on those ideas because you a week is feels short enough to waste and to sort of not take account of and also you don't get very many of them when you uh when you calculate the number in an average lifespan now actually I think in some ways the book is almost an argument against the title and I'll say what I mean by that in that I think you could take that as an argument the the idea of 4,000 weeks that could that could lead very swiftly to a different kind of book and set of ideas which would be life is so short you've got to cram every moment of it with the most extraordinary experiences you possibly can and it's quite stressful right that's like oh no some more things I've got to do in the course of my day so where I actually wanted to take that I want to say we're actually so finite we're so limited in what we can find time for and how much control we can exert over how our lives unfold we're so limited that actually in a sense we need to give up hope of doing most of the things we can think of we need to give up hope of exerting most of the control we might like to exert and so there's a kind of a defeat that you have to go through here when you realize that no matter how much you cram your life with exciting experiences you'll never get to do more than a tiny fraction of what the world has to offer but my argument is that defeat is incredibly liberating and empowering and actually leads on to bigger and better accomplishments because that's when you get to stop trying to do this crazy impossible thing of getting your arms around the whole of the world and you see that actually you're your job as it were in the world is to show up and do some things and do them you know with a with as much presence as you can muster and to do them now instead of waiting uh decades until you feel uh completely ready to do them so for me imperfection ism is just the outlook on life that starts from the place that says okay there's always going to be too much to do more meaningful things you could in principle do with your time than you're going to be able to do so now what you're never going to sort of cure all your all the aspects of your personality you don't like all of this is never going to happen so now what it really is not a recipe for despair or for sort of settling for a life of mediocrity it's incredibly exciting cuz it's like now you can bring all those meaningful things and those ways of being forward from the future you know into your life right now and really get stuck in to being wholeheartedly who you are right here and now it also makes me think that you know there's kind of this cliche of like what would you do if you found out you were going to die in a week and I think that the like cliche answer to that at Le that I've heard is like I would travel the world I would buy a fancy car I would do all these drugs I would like do this wild stuff and I think that the reality is that if you actually genuinely knew you had a week to live you would probably stay where you are and spend time with the people that you care about and maybe do a few things that really matter you probably wouldn't be out pursuing like the highest possible highs and the most dramatic experiences that's not actually what we want to do with our limited time when we know it is limited right first of all the aspiration would be that you ### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F2DLThsEGE&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) were in the ideal case you would already be living the way you wanted to spend those final days actually many of us may be living something closer to that than we let ourselves believe given the pressures in the culture and from all other all sorts of other sources to sort of be super extraordinary like that isn't actually what makes us feel most alive on a sort of regular basis it's a reason to get started on things not a reason to give up on them I do want to put a pretty big disclaimer on here which I I've said many times over the course of this podcast but is that you know this show is called how to be a better human and I have a lot of qualms about that as a title and an idea and I love how you really push back in your book on the idea that we'd ever become a better person some other person who's better and Fuller and more generous and um and yet that also does not mean that you can't follow your best impulses you give the example of you know you walk by U someone who's asking for money and you feel the urge to help them to give them some money but instead you say to yourself well I actually heard that it's more effective to give to a charity that um deals with homelessness so I'm not going to help this person I'm instead going to give to the charity but then later on you forget and you don't actually give to the charity so you've done nothing um which I think is a very relatable uh experience in my understanding of what being a better human would be it's not being a different human it's being the best version of yourself um and I think that's really hard it takes a lot of work but it also uh is simpler than maybe it would look like from the outside which I think your example captures is that you already have that impulse so why not just allow it yeah I think that's a really deep point in fact there's a sort of a paradox here that I'm not sure anyone has ever sort of um solved as it were maybe it can't be solved and so I'm not going to solve it now but it's captured by that um famous line from the humanist psychotherapist KL Rogers who says the Curious Paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am then I can change it's also captured in that idea of becoming more of who you are which you know doesn't really make any sense if we're going to be very sort of rational and Technical about it and yet I think most of us can connect with what that means in some sort of pre-verbal way so I'm experimenting with this notion of like what would it mean to allow yourself to be more fully who you are and that's a completely legitimate definition of the phrase better human not trying to sort of make yourself into a more generous person but accepting the possibility that you may already be uh a perfectly generous person and just need to get a little bit better at the action of not getting in the way of who you are at your best it's also related to an Insight which I've written about several times from the therapist Bruce Tiff who has this kind of thought experiment he invites people to do where you sort of you take the thing that bothers you the most about yourself like maybe you're incredibly distractable or a procrastinator or you have a short temper or something and you just sort of think well what if I never change in this regard or what if some version of this is with me to the very end of my life if I'm just always going to be a bit of a procrastinator or I would say in my case a bit of a catastrophizer a bit anxiety prone I can just sort of get on with life now instead of postponing the real part of life till I've fixed this thing I can show up now as Tiff also says there's something a little bit scary about showing up fully for life which is the secret payoff of telling yourself that you've got a big problem that needs fixing you don't quite have to show up uh now because you can tell yourself I'm going to do that when it's fixed but overall I think that notion of like okay then I can let go of that and just actually get on with the things I want to do instead of uh worrying away at um at trying to be someone that I'm not and it's interesting because right that exact same thing right when I think about my wife she doesn't love transitions are hard for her even when we're going somewhere fun if we're going on a fun vacation the first day of getting into the new place is a little bit of a challenge for her it's not her favorite day now when I think about that with her I don't think oh I hope one day she'll become totally comfortable with all transitions because that's when she'd finally be a good person I'm just like yeah that's Molly that's fine right but when it's me I'm like oh why can't I be good with transitions I wish I was I'm so bad at Transitions and it's such a huge fatal flaw in my personality now that's actually not my fatal flaw mine is probably something more like um ego related I can have a big head and that is sometimes helpful and sometimes very unhelpful right and yet the moment you see it and the moment you accept that it's a part of you kind of let go of some notion that you're entirely within your own power to uh to to change yourself there's this lovely quote I use from Adam Phillips ### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F2DLThsEGE&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) psychoanalyst who says along the lines of if we met the person in reality who is inside our heads kind of yelling at us berating yourself treating yourself in ways you'd never dream of treating a friend uh we just think they were as he puts it like he would just be boring and cruel right it's just like there's just it's just that would just be an obnoxious person they would need help and yet that person lives inside many of our our minds we hold ourselves to standards that essentially impossible to reach and are just unfairly applied as against other people I found that a very useful Insight when I first sort of started exploring work on self-compassion and things like that because something in my nature or perhaps also my culture sort of predisposes me to think that all that stuff about self-compassion is kind of cringe you know and I don't want um I don't want to go there and start treating myself as some incredibly special person and worthy of uh you know vast amounts of cosmic love or something and of course all we're talking about here is like could you maybe just um extend the same amount of uh basic decency to yourself that you already extend to friends naturally and I found that very powerful it's like oh yeah actually yeah I don't need to think I'm special I just not specially inferior to um all the other people in my life I want to just share an anecdote with you which I hadn't thought of in a long time and I thought of when I was reading your book and I wonder um if it'll resonate with you which is I was maybe 18 or 19 years old I was in my first year of University and I was visiting a friend and we were I remember I was taking the train to visit her and I was on the train and I was with uh it happened to be with one of her College roommates who we were sitting together we were both on this train up to visit her it was the first time that I'd ever seen a like a self-help book someone actually like R AG reading a self-help book and I remember she was reading this book that was called slowing down to the speed of life and she's like this is so helpful this has really um changed my life and she gave it to me and I read it and I felt like oh there's some big insights in here but I also remember feeling in the Moment Like This is ridiculous right like we're 18 we have to slow down to the speed of life like we life hasn't even caught up with us yet and yet it also was that idea of like if I read this book I'm going to figure out the secret to how to live a meaningful life I can change myself in this way that feeling that like we could change ourselves that we could get to that there's there is a secret out there that we just haven't uncovered yet is something that you talk about a lot and that I've never really heard other people talk about in the same way that's interesting yeah no I'm well I'm glad that uh you got it from my writing I do think that the thing that underlies all of this is this notion that there is yes some way of mastering the art of Being Human that you haven't found yet and maybe quite a lot of people around you have and that's annoying and um you've got to find it somehow what you learn if you think about this and and reflect on it for a while is that and live um if there's any meaning to the idea of mastering the art of Being Human it is in getting more and more comfortable with the sense in which life can't be mastered you know as finite human beings that is just not that's not what it is to be a to live fully as a human it's much more about being able to sort of be in it and take action despite the fact that you don't know if it's the right thing or you'll do it every day for the rest of your life or you don't know if you're doing it well this culture of striving of reaching the Pinnacle of being at the top and I think that something that you've described and I feel like is was really something I see in a lot of people around me both my age and older and younger is this feeling of like just deep exhaustion that like nothing is enough and I'll never be good enough and I can't ever compete with what is out there and just it's just nothing will ever be enough and I even before I've begun it's already too late and I think it ties into this metaphor that you use uh the kayak and the super yacht I think to be human to be a finite human is effectively to be in a little oneperson kayak on a rapidly moving river right you just find yourself there on the River of time there are lots of other people around in their kayaks it's not totally solitary but you know you're just here and you're trying to stay afloat and you respond to what is happening as best as you can and sometimes there are very um choppy periods and some times there are very ### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F2DLThsEGE&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) quiet periods and all you never really sure what's coming and you just have to sort of navigate with into each new moment as best as you can and I think that what a lot of us sort of naturally instinctively let's say um want instead is what I think of as life on the super yacht right where you're on the kind of third floor of a sort of huge fancy multi-million dollar boat in the kind of air conditioned control room I don't actually claim to know a huge amount about how super Yachts are piloted and somebody's going to pull me up on this one of these days but I know as you were saying it I was like I've never been on a super yacht but I this sounds great but you know you program the route into the navigational computer system and you kind of you sit back and you're in control and you're confident about where you're going and it and it feels very sort of um secure at the same time there's something kind of sterile and lifeless about it which I think is an important Point not to miss so anyway I just think that a lot of the things we do uh when it comes to sort of use trying to manage our time the ways we try to sort of set up our lives can be best understood as ways of trying to feel like we're really on the super yot when in fact we're in the kayak ways of trying not to feel what it is to be um a limited human so an obvious one of those is if you're perpetually on a quest to become to discover the perfect productivity system the perfect morning routine the perfect set of protocols that is going to make you invincible then you're never going to get there because what you're trying to do is antithetical to Being Human if we can just a little bit let back in the reality that in fact we're in the kayak that's not only just true but it is actually a more associated with getting things moving and accomplishing things and doing things it's that's where you actually do things instead of um postponing them until you're totally sure that you're on a super yacht you know you just dive into doing them now and secondly it's just more alive right it has more of what the German social theorist har M Rosa calls resonance the thing that we really want from life is not total control over it is this kind of vibrancy that really depends to some extent he argues and I agree on not being in total control of it also makes me think that when we look back on our most Treasured Memories or the times when we felt like uh we had a really meaningful period in our life it's almost never like and it was comfortable and quiet and nothing happened right like even though we think we want that and there was nothing going on that's not what you look back on ago you know the periods of struggle or discomfort or at the very least it being you know less than ideal and you making the best of it with friends or family those are the periods that you look back and you laugh on maybe right yeah and I I refer in one part of the new book to this saying um this quotation that almost everything in life is either a good time or a good story um not every not everything I'm not claiming that there aren't just true tragedies that befall people but it's really striking how frequently the things we the memories we sort of treasure are in some sense memories of things not working out it may be that this is actually on some level the same phenomenon though as the one that people who are struck by real severe crisis you know major serious uh diagnosis of illnesses do surprisingly frequently um look back on those things as things that they're in some sense glad uh that they happened in terms of how they focused their minds on What mattered the most so in all these different levels of intensity you get this sort of basic principle that when things slip out of our control it's at least possible and perhaps quite frequent that turns out to be for the best so coming at a fromma as a comedian too like that idea of um it's either a good time or a good story that that is definitionally what it means to be a comedian to look at the world that way I would say right like it's either Pleasant fine or this is fod for my comedy later on to truly turn even a very warm audience against you is to be like my life's going great I'm in a happy stable marriage I actually just purchased a home it's quite comfortable people I can't think of a faster way to get people to throw things at you on stage than to tell them the things that are going well it's funny now I'm laughing but I'm laughing because the idea is ridiculous and I think the Deep truth there I mean humor is like there is something very much not superficial and profound about the capacity to laugh at what is happening to you or has happened to somebody else when you're laughing in an empathetic uh sort of non- contemptuous way I think that one thing that can come from feeling your way into this viewpoint on ### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F2DLThsEGE&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00) the world is a real sort of deep belly laugh at what we are as humans and how things don't work out for us several of the quotes in your book are surprisingly from comedians right you have a Mitch Hedberg quote that I thought was fantastic a Mitch Hedberg joke about how I I'm going to butcher it but basically you know if you're lost in the woods what you should do is just build a log cabin and live there you have dramatically improved your situation I was lost but now I live here yeah right exactly yeah yeah perfect you got I missed the punchline of course that's the most important part but that's that is like that's very funny but it also hits this kind of profound truth that you're writing about which is that like that is where you are period the idea that we're all sort of lost and that setting up home in the middle of that lostness and that lack of control is what we're here to do I feel like this will resonate with you too is that I have a friend who's um Quaker and he gave me this Quaker phrase which I I'm not Quaker but I have now written and is on my desk which just says proceed as the way opens because to me that is just that's all that you can ever do is just take the next step proceed as the way opens you don't have to know where you're going that's fascinating to me because I I love that phrase I was raised as a Quaker actually so I and I so I um but it's um it's new to me and it feels like a very Zen Quaker Insight um uh which is great that's where that's the Sweet Spot of my ven diagram of uh wisdom Traditions it's that like if if the key to success and the key to uh meaning making use of my time is to focus on action what can be done I think doing can be at least partly a present moment thing right maybe it is inherently only a present moment thing it's not about are you getting through the list and so yeah I think that it's really important to not only focus let's put it that way be realistic about it on all the things left to do which is effectively an infinite list right but the idea of focusing on what you have done the simplest way of doing this is literally to keep a done list right just to keep a list during the day where you write down the things that you have completed as you complete them it just you know bends your focus back again a little bit to uh the comparison of what you've done as against zero right not as against Infinity which is a very depressing uh place to be but as against what if I hadn't done anything today and there's a sort of a discipline that arises from that which is like okay well whatever I do next I'm going to be adding it to my done list so let me choose something that I can complete and then let me do it so that I can add it in a very satisfying way to this list I mean maybe this is only something that list Geeks like myself really find um so satisfying but I think the spirit of it is pretty satisfying and that's what you know there's an even simpler way of uh sort of so-called productivity technique that I've written about before which I still return to sometimes which is literally to get a notebook write something down on a line that you're going to do answer five emails I don't know do that one thing cross it out then write the next thing on the line underneath it make a call and do that thing then cross it out and like this shouldn't work right it's not a plan for the day it's not a set of goals and visions and quarterly uh quarterly targets or anything like that and yet there's something very powerful about it because it is this act of set settling into your finite nature picking something that feels like the right thing to do uh writing it down in inherently requires you to sort of say what done would look like on some level getting to that point and then in a very sort of ritualistic ceremonial way Crossing it out and letting it go both what works and also what makes me happy and have meaning and purpose is when I think about it more as like I'm building a muscle rather than I'm trying to accompl the task at once I mean my technique for writing is I literally will put on a white noise machine and set a timer for 45 minutes and then I just my role is I just don't get out of the chair and I found that honestly more than 45 I can maybe do a couple the best days once I'm really in my trained Zone I can maybe do two or three of those 45s but it's that's over the course of a whole day and I find that really what my goal is just to get myself into the endurance of being able to do that um and that as a goal feels much more tolerable than like I'm going to write four chapters today in my book yeah I think that's really well put and that number you know I've written in this most recent book about this kind of strange three to four hour rule of creative productivity that seems to be uh the sort of optimal amount for pretty much almost anybody if they have the freedom to do it to put into their core work if their work involves thinking or creativity or writing you know we were talking and laughing about the idea of how much an audience would hate you if you were standing on stage at a comedy show and talking about ### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F2DLThsEGE&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 33:00) how great your life is and um that's certainly true but I think that sometimes people mistake that idea as like the audience would hate you because they're jealous of you or because their lives are not um good and I actually think the truth is that like when you are connecting with another person certainly on stage in comedy but I think also just offstage when you're having a conversation right like if you really make someone laugh a lot of times they say oh that's so true because it connects to them there there's this feeling that you and they have seen something or experienced something in the same way and it makes me think about how we often want to present ourselves as perfect as we've got it all together thinking that will impress other people or bring us closer to them when in reality that's the least relatable position you could be at if someone comes over to your house and there's not a speck of dirt it's actually the least relatable thing you could do and you talk about this idea which I loved of Scruffy Hospitality yeah so this term scruffy Hospitality comes from this um Anglican Pastor from Tennessee Jack King who uses it and tells a story of it in his own life of um you know him and his wife enjoying having friends around for dinner but having such a complicated checklist of things they went through to make the house perfect for visitors that it was putting them off having visitors and his resolution their resolution to um to start just inviting people to eat on to eat what was in the cupboards and to sit in the kitchen as the kitchen was and to walk over the unmowed lawn you know because that actually allowed the thing to take place and the sort of idea here the underlying idea not limited of course to having people around for dinner is as you say it's not um it's not just that you know it's okay to not be perfect about these things it's that there is more connection usually uh when you kind of let your guard down or when you relate to people from a position of openness about flaws there's fascinating research in imposter syndrome that says that um actually the best thing that leaders and mentors can do for younger uh people in an organization say is to be honest about their own struggles rather than to sort of provide a perfect role model to inspire you to be like and one day you could be that perfect but instead to just be open about the ways in which they don't feel perfect themselves I'm always struck in my um newsletter for example how if I write something about what I do when I'm overwhelmed by email or something I will get some messages from people kind of surprised that I ever still do get overwhelmed by email even though I you know call a newsletter the imperfectionist and feel like I write quite often about uh about my own sort of struggles with these things and then secondly they will be liberated by on some level by that there's something in the freeing of realiz izing that we are on some level all in the same boat all struggling with these same conditions of modernity it doesn't make you want to give up it makes you want to say well okay I can roll up my sleeves and do my bit because I'm as qualified to do this as anybody else there's actually something generous in Sharing in sharing your imperfections and faults I think uh there it's not just that you should be allowed to do it it's that it's almost a positive good I think it's definitely a positive good Oliver burkman thank you so much for being on the show it was such a pleasure talking to you I really enjoyed it I've really enjoyed it too thanks very much Chris --- *Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/1202*